It seems their strategy is to externalize their responsibility to verify age themselves, and thus reduce their exposure to liabilities when child protection acts like COPPA are violated.

If you connect it with a permission system where you can choose whether to provide this information (e.g. >13 as a bool or age as an integer or the birthday as a date) that can't be too bad I guess?

I haven't read the whole thing of course.

Surely I'm missing something? Is the backlash due to fear of a slippery slope?

  > the Children's Social Media Safety Act
  > 
  > provide an accessible interface at account setup that requires an account holder to indicate the birth date, age, or both

  > provide an operator who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user a signal that identifies the user's age by category

Answer: they don't want to be liable and get fined $400 Million, like Meta got fined, for letting kids on social media. (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/05/business/meta-children-da...)

This is why Meta is forcing this legislation through nation-wide. They are forcing Google/Apple to take the liability, despite it not actually being Google or Apple that's providing the "harmful" social media. Meta are doing this state-by-state so nobody can track that it's them. Easier than pushing at a federal level, and raises fewer red flags from news media.

Since Google and Apple won't want to accept this liability either, the next step is requiring digital IDs and third-party verification to prove the user is of age. This will enable tracking of all users, whatever app or website they go to. Bills requiring this are already being passed at state and federal level.

Is the government going to require some sort of automated checks that verify every person who connects to the internet has this API on their OS and go after individuals that aren't in compliance?

What I expected was that we'd end up with the OS vendors actually being mandated to really do age verification, and then submitting that using Web Credentials and Secure Attestation so that the far end could trust the whole thing, locking open-source OS's out of the mix and creating more of a walled garden online than we already have. I was guessing it would become a simple checkbox on e.g. Cloudflare - "[ ] allow adult users only" or whatever - and that it would end up with vast swathes of the internet going off limits for anyone not on closed-source systems.

Now, it looks like this is just a way for parents to tell the OS "this is a kid account" and have it flow through to websites so they can easily proactively block kids from connecting without having to implement any of that crap. Yes, it's much potentially easier for a child to circumvent; but any kid who can get around that sort of thing from within an OS could probably just wipe/reinstall anyway, so who cares?

As a parent whose kids are continually trying to see what trouble they can get into, I appreciate that I will get one more potential weapon in the fight.

Can someone tell me whether I am being a fool by actually being a bit relieved it's going this way?

1 10 0000

or even better

1 10 -2000

This will turn into most useless set of laws ever

Richard Stallman advised us about it long ago.

Thank god Plan9 got relicensed into GPL. 9front might not totally free, but it's a step in case GNU+Linux gets utterly broken.

And, yes, please, go try Trisquel (novice users), GUIX (experts) and Hyperbola (experts and protocol purists).

Avoid every Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Netflix service with nonfree JS.